VIEW

Variation in Words and Phrases by Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, USA.

VIEW allows you to search the >100 million word British National Corpus and to use "anchors" and "targets" for fuzzy matches, for example, all nouns somewhere near "break" (v), adjectives near "woman", verbs near "way", and nouns near "small".

Perhaps the most unique aspect of this software is the ability to find the frequency of words and phrases in any combination of registers that you define (spoken, academic, poetry, medical, etc). In addition, you can compare between registers, for example, verbs that are more common in legal or medical texts, phrases like [I * that] that are more common in conversation than in non-fiction texts, nouns near "break" (v) that are found primarily in academic writings, etc.

[These notes are based on Mark Davies' description of his VIEW.]

Other corpora available from Brigham Young can be found here including the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The corpus is composed of more than 360 million words in nearly 150,000 texts, including 20 million words each year from 1990-2007. For each year (and therefore overall, as well), the corpus is evenly divided between the five genres of spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. The texts come from a variety of sources.

Stop press 1.1.2012

Mark Davies has just released a new interface for his Corpus of Contemporary American English, sitting alongside the existing one.

The idea is to bring together the main characteristics of search items in a single window, rather than requiring multiple searches and reorderings.

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Try the alternative COCA interface: www.wordandphrase.info. Frequency lists (1-60,000), integrated genre information, definitions, collocates, concordance lines, synonyms, and WordNet